KEEP IT SIMPLE: THE SHORT COURSE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION
The civil war book fulfilled Stalin’s desire for heroic history to inspire the Soviet masses, but in the mid-1930s he was focused on a more important editing project – one aimed at key party members and activists: a new history of the party itself: a book that would explain clearly and credibly the complicated and tumultuous history of the party, its divisions and schisms, and its denouement in the Great Terror. How had the party succeeded in its historic mission while incubating clusters of high-level traitors, spies, assassins and saboteurs? The book also needed to educate members in matters theoretical, equip them with knowledge and understanding to shield them from malign influences and enable them to correctly implement the party line.10
The Short History arose from Stalin’s dissatisfaction with extant textbook histories of the party which did not connect its history with that of the country or provide a Marxist explanation of internal factional struggles. Crucial was to depict the struggle against anti-Bolshevik tendencies as a principled struggle for Leninism and as a battle that stopped the party from degenerating into a reformist, social-democratic organisation.
Appended to this memorandum of Stalin’s, which dates from spring 1937, was his schema for the periodisation of the new party history.11 The writing task eventually fell to party propaganda chief Pyotr Pospelov and court historian Yemel’yan Yaroslavsky. Their final draft, presented to Stalin in spring 1938, cleaved closely to his preferred chapterisation but the boss was not happy with the results of their labour. As he later explained to his Politburo colleagues, eleven of the draft’s twelve chapters required fundamental revision, principally to strengthen its treatment of the party’s theoretical development – so necessary because of the ‘weakness of our cadres in the sphere of theory’.12
When the Short Course was published in September 1938, initially in Pravda and then as a book, Stalin was identified as the author of the section on dialectical and historical materialism, while the rest was attributed to an anonymous commission of the central committee. After the Second World War, Stalin was credited as author of the whole book and it was earmarked for publication as volume 15 of his collected works. As the prime editor of Pospelov and Yaroslavsky’s draft, he cut scores of pages, deleted hundreds of paragraphs and interpolated masses of his own text. He also made thousands of minor corrections. The Short Course was truly a history of the party as Stalin saw it and wanted it to be seen.
The end product of Stalin’s efforts was a biased, distorted and simplistic account of the party’s history, one manufactured by omission, elision and rhetorical tricks. Stalin was a past master at using such devices to present versions of events that were self-serving but credible. That doesn’t mean he didn’t believe in the essential truth of his version of the party’s history.
Pospelov and Yaroslavsky wrote reams of invective directed against Trotsky and other opponents of Stalin, which he deleted, substituting a pithy narrative thread that conveyed a sustained critique of the opposition while at the same time dimming the spotlight on them. It told a story of how misguided opponents became a bunch of careerists and opportunists and then resorted to treachery. When the anti-party and anti-Soviet line of these oppositionists was roundly rejected by the great majority of party members, they allied themselves with foreign capitalists and imperialists and engaged in terrorism and sabotage. Only in the mid-1930s did the extent of their ‘monstrous moral and political depravity’, of their ‘despicable villainy and treachery’ become fully apparent.
Numerous laudatory accounts of his own role in the history of the party were deleted by Stalin. He disappeared almost entirely from the party’s pre-revolutionary history, leaving Lenin as its one and only commanding figure. Stalin allowed himself to feature more heavily in the chapters dealing with the 1920s and 1930s, but given the centrality of his role in these years, it would have been difficult to do otherwise. Stalin also cut references to many other individuals, reducing Pospelov and Yaroslavsky’s text to an essentially institutional history of the party, its policies, factions and major actions. For Stalin that was the whole edifying point: to engage readers with the history of the party as a collective body, as an institution. He wanted his people to love the party, not Big Brother.
To supplement his editorial efforts, Stalin held a series of meetings in his Kremlin office to review each segment of the book before it was published by Pravda. In attendance were Molotov, Zhdanov and Pravda editor I. Ya. Rovinsky, as well as Yaroslavsky and Pospelov.13
Following publication, Stalin explained to a conference of leading party propagandists that the book’s main purpose was to educate cadres in matters of theory, specifically the laws of historical development. To illustrate the importance of theory, Stalin offered a rather dramatic example: ‘When we talk about the saboteurs, about the Trotskyists, you have to keep in mind that . . . not all of them were spies . . . among them were our people who went crazy. Why? They weren’t real Marxists, they were weak in theory.’14
The book was ‘addressed to our cadres’, said Stalin, ‘not to ordinary workers on the shop floor, nor to ordinary employees in institutions, but to cadres who Lenin described as professional revolutionaries. This book is addressed to our administrative cadres. They most of all need to go and work on their theory; after that everyone else can.’15
Stalin defended the book’s de-personalisation:
[Originally], this draft textbook was for the most part based on exemplary individuals – those who were the most heroic, those who escaped from exile and how many times they escaped, those who suffered in the name of the cause, etc., etc.
But should a textbook really be designed like that? Can we really use such a thing to train and educate our cadres? We ought to base our cadres’ training on ideas, on theory. . . . If we possess such knowledge, then we’ll have real cadres, but if people don’t possess this knowledge, they won’t be cadres – they’ll be just empty spaces.
What do exemplary individuals really give us? I don’t want to pit ideas and individuals against one another – sometimes it’s necessary to refer to individuals, but we should refer to them only as much as is really necessary. It is ideas that really matter, not individuals – ideas in a theoretical context.16
At the end of the conference Stalin talked delegates through some of the book’s historical content, making this general point about studying the past:
History should be truthful, it must be written as it was, without adding anything. What we have nowadays is history from 500 years ago being criticised from the point of view of the present. How can that be chronological? Religion had a positive significance in the time of Vladimir the Saint. At that time there was paganism, and Christianity was a step forward. Now our wise men say from the point of view of the new situation in the twentieth century that Vladimir was a scoundrel, the pagans were scoundrels and religion was vile i.e. they don’t want to evaluate events dialectically so that everything has its time and place.17
The Short Course addressed fundamental theory in its section on dialectical and historical materialism. Written by Stalin, it was the culmination and synthesis of his studies of Marxist philosophy. It was inserted into chapter four of the book, which dealt with the party’s history from 1908 to 1912, the pretext being that such a digression was necessary to understand the importance of Lenin’s major theoretical work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.18